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Everything is Going to Be Just Fine

My friend, the editor of a national magazine, landed the Super Bowl tickets at the last minute, on the Friday before the game, meaning I had to fly to the Midwest on a red eye from Los Angeles. I left for the airport from a dinner party at a screenwriter’s house. There were several conservative journalists there, and a lot of the talk, over plates of cassoulet, was of President Obama’s supposed links to a shadowy radical cabal that had allegedly groomed him through the years for a Manchurian-Candidate-style presidency intended to subvert the Constitution and turn America over to hidden enemies. One of the journalists, a well-known blogger, was set to dine in Chicago the next night with William Ayers, the Weather Underground bomber, whom the blogger believed had helped write Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father. Some theories never die. As my flight to the Super Bowl approached, the suspicious blogger drank red wine and filled the balmy California night with frightening notions of crisis and decline that contrasted starkly with the glamorous setting. If the country, as he suggested, was going to hell, it appeared to be doing so in style.

I landed in Chicago at 6 a.m. and rented a car for the drive to Indianapolis, aware that I was passing through a swing state whose mood and condition might turn the next election. Pro sports don’t interest me much but politics do, so I kept an eye out for indications of the socioeconomic catastrophe that Republican alarmists insist is stalking our imperiled nation. There were no signs of it anywhere I looked. Even at seven-thirty in the morning, the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour ’adult superstore’ built beside the highway was partly filled with idling semis whose drivers were inside shopping for lube and dildos. Further along, at a diner where I ate breakfast, the guys at the counter were talking Super Bowl point spreads and gorging on plates of ketchup-covered hash browns. If this was a moment of dire "national danger," as Indiana’s governor Mitch Daniels had warned the public in his grim, apocalyptic response to the State of the Union address, these famished football fans seemed unconcerned.

Indianapolis, a city of mystery to me, so deeply ordinary it feels exotic, so thoroughly average it feels unreal, was decked out in corporate finery for the game, flying the banners of multi-national branding that make the event a kind of capitalist New Year. Dominating the downtown skyline was the futuristic blue monolith of the JW Marriott hotel, one of whose gleaming faces was given over to a multicolored sign hundreds of feet tall and almost as wide that advertised the coming titanic contest. Underneath the colossus, in the streets, thousands and thousands of warmly-dressed citizens who, if the gloomy electioneers were right, faced imminent homelessness and permanent joblessness, mobbed the crosswalks, grinning and half-drunk. Music played at top-volume from hidden speakers, completing the atmosphere of joyous denial. For people about to go crashing over a precipice of government debt and socialist regulation, they sure were buying a lot of souvenirs.

I met my friend in a hospitality lounge set up by Nike to help promote their contract to supply footwear, jerseys, and other equipment to the NFL. Spike Lee was there, decked out in New York Giants wear. He and his son were scoring free monogrammed shoes from a handsome company rep whose job was to pamper the room full of celebrities, most of whom were black and hugely muscular and wearing saucer-sized jewel-encrusted watches that marked them as athletic pseudo-royalty. They ate their fill at the baked-potato bar, washed down their meals with free premium scotch, and crowded around a half-dozen flat-screen TVs tuned to college basketball games and the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction announcements. Next to a gleaming display of Nike cleats the color of neon signs and UFOs, Spike Lee posed for pictures with smiling admirers, none of them bothered in the least, apparently, by the ostensible disintegration of their formerly great nation. I could only imagine poor Mitch Daniels disgust at having to preside over a state so grossly oblivious to its own collapse.

That night, thanks to Nike’s bottomless largesse, my friend and I attended a Pacers game in one of downtown Indianapolis’s glorious assortment of shiny new stadiums. The game began with the national anthem, sung with resonant, full-throated patriotism, and soon the crowd was ignoring the whole spectacle, spending lavishly on beer and snacks in anticipation of the last minute, which typically lasts an hour in modern pro sports. As also happens with presidential elections, time is weirdly distorted in such matches, elongating as the action goes along. The scoring in the first part of the game is no more relevant to the ultimate outcome than Santorum’s recent caucus victories. As it turned out, the Pacers lost that night, but by the time they did, it hardly mattered, since everyone in the stadium was bushed, their sluggish GI tracts clogged with nacho cheese. By November, we’ll all feel similarly, I’m betting. Romney? Obama? Same difference. Time for bed.

Super Bowl Sunday dawned the way they all do, with utter indifference to our Lord and Savior. The conservatives never tire of reminding us that America is a Christian nation, but We the People never tire of demonstrating that the Sabbath can be safely ignored, especially when trophies are at stake. When my friend and I woke in a La Quinta Inn located miles away from Lucas Oil Stadium (all the convenient downtown hotels were packed), it took us a while to remember where we were, that’s how late we’d been out partying with the likes of Jon Hamm and other Hollywood types who’d flown in to Indiana for the big orgy. The only class of celebrities not present were the presidential candidates, who knew better than to spoil the fun with their Cassandra-like rhetoric of disaster. That, or they realized how crazy they’d surely seem surrounded by scores of models in push-up bras clamoring for a shot at Jon Hamm’s room key while being ogled by software zillionaires who’d paid a tidy thousand bucks a head just to be there with him in the same night club. I met at least four such magnates at the party, and none of them seemed at all worried by the deficit. One of them introduced himself to me as an ’acceleration consultant.’ When I asked him what he meant by this, he told me, "It’s simple: I make things go faster. Websites, ecutives, corporations, brands. I help them reach their top velocities." A country that can support a jerk like this would appear to have little to fear from higher tax rates.

The football-game part of the Super Bowl goes quickly (until its last two minutes, that is). For friends of Nike and other mega-firms, the festivities start with a swag-filled ’tailgate party’ held in a cordoned-off room under the stadium that, despite its pretense of exclusivity, can easily fit five thousand VIPs. In this recession-proof catacomb of freebies, far from the coast-to-coast bummer of the campaign, I watched a succession of giddy businessmen position themselves behind a couple of mannequins tricked out in game-day pads and jerseys. A bored photographer snapped their pictures while they simulated God-like confidence, looking for just a moment like Romney always looks. That they’ll do the same next year no matter who’s elected, you can be sure of it. Things will be just fine.

A ball was tossed around and then Madonna sang. She’s the diva of super-prosperity, that woman. Her high-kicking legs and vast, pansexual dance-troupe conjured up glitzy memories of the boom years, back before our national descent into paranoid partisanship and pessimism. She ran through her hits and the years melted away, revealing a core of American contentment that suddenly seemed like our default condition, the one that the candidates labor to convince us will never return but has really never left us. I missed the Clint Eastwood commercial intoning that "It’s Halftime in America." But I gazed at the faces around me. They had that look of people who who understand that they’re watching live, in person, what tens of millions of their countrymen are taking in electronically, on screens. One nation under Nike, is how it felt.

Some in politics tell us otherwise—that we’re going to hell, we’re cracking up—but of course it’s all a game.

Walter Kirn is the author, most recently, of a memoir, "Lost in the Meritocracy." His 2001 novel "Up in the Air" is the basis for the film of the same name. His column appears every Friday.

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